Round Square, Scattered Memory

Urban Oblivion at Berlin’s Kulturforum

Taking the Kulturforum in Berlin as its central case study, this article investigates how processes of forgetting operate not merely as historiographic blind spots but as active agents of urban transformation. Responding to the editors’ invitation to reconsider oblivion as a productive force within architectural memory, and drawing on critical heritage studies, the article argues that the Kulturforum exemplifies a form of urban oblivion: a condition in which material erasure, selective remembrance, and symbolic over-inscription jointly shape the contemporary city – and in which symbolically charged narratives tend to warp the actual physical remains.

The Kulturforum is among Berlin’s most symbolically charged sites. Frequently interpreted through its historical genesis – from Albert Speer’s aborted plans for a monumental round square within the National Socialist north-south axis, to its post-war reconfiguration as a democratic, modernist counter-image in the “Free West” – the area is commonly read as an organic urban landscape opposing the dictatorial rigidity of previous plans. While such narratives illuminate aspects of its symbolic positioning, they tend to privilege voluntaristic references over material continuities and losses, and obstruct a more open and critical engagement with the area’s past, present, and future.

The article identifies three intertwined dimensions of forgetting embedded in the site. First, the expansive open spaces of the Kulturforum are often celebrated as expressions of modernist urban design, obscuring the fact that systematic demolition was a decisive planning instrument both under the Generalbauinspektor (GBI) in Nazi Germany and in the post-war decades, leaving almost no pre-existing structure intact. Second, the area's form is inseparable from car-centred traffic paradigms: automobile circulation became the primary metric of rational planning, evident in the prolonged reconstruction of the Potsdamer Brücke (1898-1938-1966). Third, an even more radical oblivion concerns National Socialist forced labour. On the fragmentary remains of Speer's planned round square, a forced labour camp with prefabricated wooden barracks was established in 1942 for aircraft production workers – an episode entirely absent from the site today and long marginalised within German memory culture, not least due to the absence of visible traces.

Through a close reading of material remnants – such as the misattributed mosaic fragment in the courtyard of the Staatsbibliothek – the article demonstrates how misremembering and misplacement further complicate architectural memory. It concludes by advocating a shift away from the harmonising logic of recent master plans toward an open-ended engagement with the materiality of urban forgetting. Such an approach offers critical tools for rethinking the Kulturforum as a terrain vague and for situating heritage as a dynamic, contested field rather than a stable archive – a perspective with direct implications for the ongoing debate around the 2026 Konsensplan for the area’s future development.

In 1943, French author and cartoonist François Cavanna arrived in Berlin as a forced labourer. In his autobiographical novel Les Russkoffs, he recalls his conscription into the Service du travail obligatoire (STO), his work for the electronics company Graetz AG in Berlin-Treptow, and his later deployment in a rubble commando. His recollection of the city is striking:

For a Parisian, Berlin is a straying bastard city, barely a city. Its vast expanse encompasses forests, lakes, meadows, and even cultivated fields, wedged between blocks of buildings. And even in the highly urbanised part of Berlin – the monumental Berlin – immense empty spaces suddenly catch you off guard. Everything aims for the grandiose, for the deliberately heavy-handed, but that is precisely the intended effect. Overwhelming, that’s it. […]. The result is a city with a loose texture, cut through by gigantic avenues, riddled with boundless squares swept by the bitter winds of the Baltic or scoured to the bone by icy storms coming in from the steppes¹.

It remains uncertain whether Cavanna ever passed through the area around Potsdamer Platz – yet the description resonates with its spatial condition at the time in an almost uncanny manor. Vast open spaces, abrupt voids, and monumental gestures appear here as constitutive elements of an urban landscape shaped as much by projection and destruction as by construction.

Taking the Kulturforum in Berlin as its central case study (fig. 1), this article investigates how processes of forgetting operate not merely as historiographic blind spots but as active agents of urban transformation. Responding to the editors’ invitation to reconsider oblivion as a productive force within architectural memory, it argues that the Kulturforum exemplifies a form of urban oblivion: a condition in which material erasure, selective remembrance, and symbolic over-inscription jointly shape the contemporary city – and in which symbolically charged interpretations risk obscuring the physical remains they purport to explain.

The Kulturforum is among Berlin’s most symbolically charged sites. It is frequently interpreted through its historical genesis: from Albert Speer’s aborted plans for the monumental Round Square (fig. 2) within the National Socialist north-south axis to its post-war reconfiguration as a democratic, modernist counter-image in the “Free West”. In this reading, the area appears as an organic urban landscape opposing the dictatorial rigidity of earlier planning. While such narratives illuminate its political-intellectual positioning, they tend to privilege symbolic references over material continuities and losses, thereby constraining a more open and critical engagement with the site’s past, present, and future.

Building on Martin Warnke’s concept of “Bau und Gegenbau”² (building and counter-building), the German monument conservator and scholar Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper has proposed interpreting the Kulturforum precisely through this relational lens. According to her, the project – most prominently in the work of Hans Scharoun – constitutes a deliberate attempt to oppose axiality and hierarchical spatial order. These counter-buildings do not aim at repression or erasure but at a form of critical engagement: the memory of Speer’s north-south axis is, in this sense, preserved and erased at the same time within the Kulturforum, even as former spatial relations are overlaid and rendered invisible³.

Such an identification of counter-building however entails a selective perspective that risks canonising Nazi urbanism by framing it primarily through its monumental intentions. By contrast I will highlight blurred and no longer inscribed memories and what has been materially erased rather than symbolically retained. Building on the concepts of heritage as a discursive practice, the article argues, that the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD)⁴ results not only in a vertical power relation and a subsequent negotiation or struggle between oppressive politics and practices of counter-memory on different spatial scales⁵. Rather it tries to unveil strata of non-verbal urban memory: these have neither places (sites), voices (communities), nor material manifestations (monuments) in the urban space. They become subjects and actors of urban oblivion. 

In this sense, the article departs from barely visible material traces – rubble, fragments, footprints, stratifications – to examine the social construction of heritage through the active process of forgetting. Topoi such as demolition as architectural practice, car-centred infrastructure, and labour exploitation occupy little space even within debates on “dissonant” architectural heritage, which often remains dominated by a canonical, hegemonic understanding of the built environment as a field of legible, competing political architectures.

The absences do not even register as absences. They must be seen as erasures that have themselves been erased. The Berlin Kulturforum becomes a site where the relations between centre and (inner) periphery⁶ must be renegotiated: moving away from a centralised reading of canonical Nazi-era heritage (i.e. the North-South axis), the site must be understood as an inner margin of the city – permanently in transition, a decades-long construction site, an infrastructural hub, and a site of forced labour.

Three interrelated dimensions of forgetting structure this investigation. First, the expansive open spaces of the Kulturforum are commonly interpreted as expressions of modernist urbanism, while the decisive role of systematic demolition remains underacknowledged. Second, the area’s form is inseparable from car-centred traffic paradigms: automobile circulation became the primary metric of rational planning, evident in the prolonged reconstruction of the Potsdamer Brücke bridge (1898-1938-1966). Third, an even more radical oblivion concerns forced labour during World War II. On the fragmentary remains of Speer’s planned round square, a forced labour camp with prefabricated wooden barracks was established in 1942 for aircraft production workers. This episode is entirely absent from the site today and has long been marginalised within German memory culture, not least due to the absence of visible traces.

The article draws on a combination of archival sources alongside close readings of material remnants and historiographical analysis. Rather than treating these sources as illustrations of a pre-given argument, the conceptual framework developed here emerges from the gaps, misattributions, and silences the sources themselves reveal. Ultimately, it questions the limited historicity of more recent urban design approaches, culminating in the so-called Konsensplan of 2026.

The Kulturforum in Berlin remains a fragmented urban area that embodies the challenges of modern and contemporary urbanism in both its material fabric and its symbolic significance. While initial ideas for rebuilding the heavily damaged area in Berlin’s Tiergarten district date back to the immediate post-war period, it was the decision to relocate the design for the Philharmonie (Hans Scharoun, 1956) from Wilmersdorf to the Kemperplatz in Berlin-Tiergarten that set the course for the site’s subsequent development in 1959. Buildings by Scharoun himself followed⁷, alongside other remarkable and canonical architectures⁸.

Despite its remarkable individual architectural works, the Kulturforum is widely perceived as a troubling urban space. The Swiss architectural historian and critic Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani has pointed out that even its name is misleading, as it presents itself as a “vast, heterogeneous, and somewhat haphazardly developed terrain, cut into two unequal halves by a major traffic artery. It invites the car driver to pass through it swiftly, not least because no square emerges that would encourage one to stop”. Previous attempts at redesign have petered out, if they did not fail altogether. Despite ongoing planning and construction efforts, Lampugnani identifies a peculiar lethargy inherent to the site – one that seems to paralyze or absorb any courageous alternative⁹.

It remains an open question whether this troubling condition is linked to the material history of the site. Nevertheless, it calls for a careful engagement with its pre-1945 past. The area south of the Tiergarten park developed during the second half of the nineteenth century from a peripheral zone into a densely built, affluent, and bourgeois urban district. When Albert Speer was appointed Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt (General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital), the creation of a central north-south axis formed a key component of his urban development scheme (fig. 3). However, the idea of such an axis for Berlin was significantly older, reflecting a widely acknowledged problem in Berlin’s urban planning discourse since the eighteenth century¹⁰. The introduction of reliable electric railways in the 1930s enabled the partial undergrounding of north-south railway infrastructure, thereby freeing substantial surface areas for development and reinforcing the possibility of a continuous axis between the Spreebogen and a new southern railway terminus. Yet directly along this linear trajectory lay densely built residential quarters, one of which occupied the area where the Kulturforum is located today.

During the National Socialist period, planners around Speer projected a large, monumental round square onto this site. As a central node in the sequence of the axis, the square was intended not only to produce a monumental spatial effect but also to accommodate the requirements of automotive mobility. At the same time, it was designed to structure a transition from mixed-use urban fabric to a predominantly administrative and office-based district. 

The planned square was conceived as the monumental core of a dense ensemble of representative buildings¹¹.The square, planned with a diameter of 210 meters, remained unfinished. Only the shell of the House of Tourism (designed by Theodor Dierksmeier, constructed 1938-1944) stood as a visible remnant of these plans until its demolition in 1962, which made way for the construction of the State Library (fig. 4). However, another material legacy of this planning phase was equally present: together with the Spreebogen area, the Tiergarten district experienced one of the most extensive waves of demolition during the National Socialist period, indicating how far the plans had already progressed¹².

This history also points to one of the darkest aspects of the planning regime. Hundreds of families were forcibly relocated into apartments confiscated from deported Jewish residents, making Albert Speer’s authority directly complicit in profiting from and facilitating the dispossession and deportation of Berlin’s Jewish population¹³.

When the first plans for the Kulturforum were drawn up in the 1960s, the extensive ownership of urban land by the German state was largely unquestioned. In fact, the planning of the North-South Axis had already been partially realised insofar as numerous parcels had been requisitioned by planning authorities prior to 1945¹⁴. As these properties had been – largely legally – acquired, no systematic restitution took place in the area. Consequently, large contiguous plots of land were available for the construction of major cultural institutions, facilitated in particular by the absence of surviving historic buildings.

However, the apparent tabula rasa of the site must not obscure the fact that it resulted from three distinct and cumulative historical phases. First, demolitions had already begun in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as mentioned above. Second, the Second World War transformed the area into a vast landscape of ruins. A contemporary entry from the chronicle of the Speer administration even reveals how aerial warfare was perceived within planning logic:

During the night of April 25 to 26 [1941], three buildings in the demolition area south of the Round Square were hit in an air raid. The English thereby provided valuable work for the purposes of remodeling¹⁵.

The heavy bombing of Berlin began in 1943; yet as late as September of that year, the area around the construction site of the House of Tourism still appears largely intact (fig. 4). Air raids intensified from the winter of 1943/44 onwards and reached their peak in February 1945, when the area was also heavily affected. A large number of buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. The ruins were subsequently treated as mere rubble and systematically cleared. Only a small number of houses remained, among them the shell of the House of Tourism. 

During the 1950s, a third wave of loss followed: the demolition campaigns undertaken by the West Berlin Senate. From the earliest post-war reconstruction plans onwards, the area was conceived as a tabula rasa, a vast urban field in which the historic street grid was largely disregarded. With few exceptions – such as Matthäi Church – pre-existing structures were not considered worthy of preservation and gradually disappeared, even when they had survived both National Socialist demolition programmes and wartime destruction relatively intact.

The difficulty of commemorating even deliberately removed buildings becomes particularly evident in the case of a fragment: a piece of wall, a few bricks, and a barely legible mosaic, located in the courtyard of the State Library (fig. 5). In 2021, an image of this fragment was included in the exhibition Utopie Kulturforum, which addressed the past, present, and future of the site in brightly coloured, marketing-style visualisations. Its web version remains accessible online, where the fragment is described as follows:

Where monumental architecture was supposed to glorify the massification of the individual, democratic Germany planned an asymmetrically designed place of cultural transmission and free science: creative, inspirational architectural counter-images to the stone deserts of National Socialism. What remains is a piece of debris, barely two meters long and 80 cm high, topped with a mosaic. Whose impetus it was to preserve a relic of Nazi architecture is unknown¹⁶.

However, this interpretation is highly questionable. It remains unclear who first attributed the fragment to the House of Tourism, yet this reading is structurally shaped by a strongly voluntaristic cultural narrative in which symbolical interpretation overrides material evidence. As architect Michael Richter of Berlin’s urban exploration association Berliner Unterwelten has demonstrated, the fragment does not originate from the House of Tourism, demolished in 1962 to make way for Scharoun’s State Library¹⁷. Rather, it belonged to a Jugendstil building complex built in 1903 and known as the Bayernhof, located only a few dozen meters away. This complex, consisting of hotels and gastronomic facilities, was designed in an eclectic historicist style that reflected idealised notions of Bavarian and German cultural identity. 

The demolition of the Bayernhof is emblematic of the continuity of tabula rasa logics that shaped the development of the Kulturforum, leaving little space for the less favoured eclectic architecture of the German Empire. Standing as a ruin for almost three decades, the building increasingly obstructed car traffic and lost any perceived future, not least due to its proximity to the Berlin Wall. Its final phase of use included its role as a setting for a 1969 concert by the Krautrock band Tangerine Dream, broadcast on German television. 

The courtyard fountain appears as a main character. Later, it was relocated to today’s Hindemith Square, while parts of the mosaics were reused in the decoration of the Richard-Wagner-Platz underground station. This approach of re-utilising remnants in the 1970s further underscores the likelihood that the fragment was deliberately placed in the State Library courtyard as a commemorative gesture towards the former building. Yet as this memory faded, the curators of the Utopie Kulturforum exhibition incorporated its imagined origin into a canonical narrative of the site. This illustrates the process outlined in the introduction: the identification of heritage remains oriented towards the monumental logic of National Socialist urban planning, even where its material basis is uncertain or displaced.

Today’s Potsdamer Brücke, the most important southbound access to the Forum, constitutes another example of layered and complex urban development processes. Like many infrastructural structures, it possesses a rich yet contradictory and largely overlooked history. The earliest bridge spanning the Landwehr Canal (then known as Schaafgraben) dates back to the 15th century. When the trench was adapted to accommodate timber rafting and shipping, it had to be replaced by a drawbridge. This structure, too, proved inadequate for the demands of modern traffic – particularly the tram system – and was therefore replaced in 1897-1898 by a triangular-shaped bridge that integrated crossings for Victoriastraße and Potsdamer Straße¹⁸. The bridge spanned 26 metres and featured only minimal decoration in the substructure due to its narrow design (fig. 6). By contrast, the roadway was elaborately ornamented to correspond with the style of the nearby Siegesallee, a monumental boulevard constructed after 1895 to celebrate Prussian imperialism.

While the initial, pre-1933 plans for the North-South axis had envisaged retaining the bridge, later designs for the circular square proposed the construction of the House of Tourism directly on Victoriastraße. Foundation works commenced in June 1938, rendering the western section of the triangular bridge obsolete and leading to its demolition. The Potsdamer Brücke was intended to be rebuilt as a 36-metre-wide steel beam bridge. Although this structure was never realised, a temporary bridge erected in 1939 accommodated traffic from the demolished section of the former crossing. This provisional arrangement was damaged during World War II and subsequently repaired in the late 1940s, before being replaced in 1966 by a wider prestressed concrete bridge (fig. 7). The revised traffic planning responded to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, which transformed Potsdamer Straße into a cul-de-sac. Consequently, the street layout was altered to redirect traffic toward the northwest¹⁹.

While a common narrative traces the development from wartime destruction through bombs to the Kollektivplan of 1946 and the traffic policies of a divided Berlin, this overlooks the extent to which the Nazi-era planning had already promoted a car-oriented model of urbanism. The fragmented history of the bridge shows that the North-South Axis should not be seen as merely an expression of megalomaniac planning ambitions, but as an attempt to make urban transport infrastructure more efficient. Its realisation depended fundamentally on the possibility of relocating nearby railway lines underground – a development made feasible by the electrification of the railways – which in turn opened up extensive inner-city areas for redevelopment.

At the same time, the automobile emerged as the defining mode of modern urban transport and as a key driver within Nazi Germany’s industrialisation policies. In this context, the KdF-Wagen (later Volkswagen) functioned as a symbolic  – almost messianic – emblem of a new era. Urban transport planning was intended to facilitate and accelerate this transformation. In its formal and conceptual dimensions, car-centred urbanism exhibits clear continuities beyond 1945, and the history of the Potsdamer Brücke provides a particularly illustrative example of these enduring trajectories.

The last example of oblivious urban practices can be observed in the erasure of the physical traces of forced labour during Nazi Germany. The metropolitan area of Berlin was one of the centres of armament production, for example for the German air force: “Air armament was […] massively expanded on the outskirts of the Reich capital”²⁰. Forced labour was central to this expansion, particularly following the military crisis of Nazi German warfare in 1941-1942²¹. Armament production in Berlin depended heavily on the influx of workers from across Europe. Greater Berlin, including its outskirts, became one of the largest sites of forced labour deployment and accommodation: out of approximately 13 million individuals exploited for the war economy, 500,000 workers passed through Berlin between 1941 and 1945. They were housed in nearly 3,000 camp sites, most accommodating between 100 and 200 persons, while the largest held approximately 3,000. Not all camps consisted of wooden barracks; many workers were accommodated in existing vacant buildings. Yet another testimony from French author Cavanna suggests the omnipresence of wooden barracks in Berlin.

At that time, Berlin had become covered with wooden barracks… In every nook and cranny of the colossal city slipped rows of parallelepipeds of yellow fir, capped with tarred paper. Gross Berlin – that is to say Berlin and its suburbs – formed a single camp, an enormous camp, scattered among the buildings, the monuments, the offices, the stations, the factories²².

The Round Square constitutes a representative example of such interstitial spaces. Following demolitions beginning in 1938, two larger empty spaces²³ were repurposed for labour camps. Their origin lay in administrative barracks erected for the construction site of the House of Tourism²⁴. One was built by the Reichsbahn, which also oversaw the project, and rebuilt in 1940 after a fire caused by an overheated stove. In October 1941, at the height of the German Reich’s expansion, architect Richard Ullrich was commissioned to design additional temporary administrative buildings on the site. These were intended for the Zentralhandelsgesellschaft Ost, an agency dedicated to the exploitation of the economies of occupied territories in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Owing to labour shortages, construction was only completed in summer 1942 (fig. 8). 

Although the construction file does not explicitly record the subsequent repurposing of the barracks, it is likely that, in the context of the Wehrmacht’s retreat from the East and the intensification of armament production, they were integrated into production processes. 

In November 1942, only three months later, the neighbouring plot was designated for a labour camp. Commissioned by the Generalbauinspektor Albert Speer and executed through his building department under Friedrich Hetzelt, three barracks of type 501/34 (Reich Aviation Ministry standard) were erected. The urgency of the project is reflected in the designation “The matter is urgent” in November 1942²⁵. The private architect Erich Bohne was responsible for its execution.

The plot had previously been designated for the Allianz insurance building. Construction was permitted only through exemptions from standard regulations. The permit was limited to six months after a hypothetical end of the war, as the site was to remain open for representational and traffic purposes. Further exemptions included deviation from the prescribed building line, the use of an impermissible open instead of closed construction method, and non-compliance with required minimum distances between structures (fig. 9). 

Aerial photographs from September 1943 show the barracks (fig. 7); they had disappeared before March 1945, likely as a result of bombing in February and March 1945. The images from 1945 show no remaining traces of the camps. With the construction of the State library in the 1960s and 70s on top of the fragment of the round square, possible traces of the camps vanished. The second camp site was part of the vast areas around the Berlin Wall. In the 1990s, the Blue Man Group theatre building (BlueMaxTheatre) was built on the site of the labour camp.

From the 1960s to the present day, the Kulturforum was continuously re-inscribed through new buildings, infrastructures, and narratives, acquiring renewed functions within the divided and later reunified city. Yet this process of redefinition did not resolve the site’s historical entanglements. Rather, as the examples discussed in this article demonstrate the area remains marked by material residues that carry an unsettling and only partially acknowledged history.

If Scharoun’s Kulturforum, and its later extensions, can be understood as a Gegenbau to Speer’s axial planning, then it becomes evident that the counter-building simultaneously produces its own object of reference: The counter-building constructs the original building. In the act of opposing, it stabilises and canonises what it seeks to negate. The result is a selective historical image that aligns with the post-war generation’s self-understanding as a generation free of guilt. This narrative relieved them from confronting the deeper conditions of production underlying urban transformation. The examples of the continued car-oriented planning, the persisting modernist demolition practices, and the unresolved legacy of forced labour were thus not integrated into the dominant discourse. Particularly the latter  – the millions of coerced workers whose presence structured wartime Berlin – was systematically excluded from the material and conceptual reconstruction of the city.

In this sense, the relationship to the past resembles a painful and constraining framework: a pinching corset of history that is not always visible. Yet it continuously shapes perception and action. The persistent inability to establish a stable and reflective relationship to history contributes to a broader silence surrounding the site. Planning, under these conditions, becomes a form of consensus management without historical depth. Heritage risks turning into a quarry of selective narratives rather than serving as a critical and generative principle for a contemporary, post-migrant urban society.

This becomes apparent most visibly in how the site continues to be framed in the latest planning documents. The hegemonic imagery of what the Nazi past presumably consisted of – monumental, axial, neoclassical architectural forms – reinforces itself through repetition. By isolating National Socialist architecture within a recognisable architectural canon, it renders invisible everything that does not fit that image. 

By seeing the Kulturforum “as demolished territory, [that] remains heritage, politically scaled and re-spatialised through voices, markers, and embodied experiences”²⁶, a new historically informed vision could emerge. Yet the 2025-2026 masterplan does not address questions of the historicity of the quarter whatsoever. As a “Konsensplan”, it is strangulated by its own attempt to mediate between apparent necessities. It depicts a softened, green-washed, image within an austerity-driven urban regime: cultural flagship projects, tourist commodification, and local needs coexist without genuine negotiation.

Minimal interventions in the landscape – some trees, partial redesigns – cannot resolve the deeper structural tensions. Fundamental questions of urban mobility, cultural production, and urban integration remain largely untouched; proposed infrastructural transformations, such as a tramway connection, remain unrealised, while the spatial division produced by the Potsdamer Straße persists. What is striking is not merely the absence of a coherent vision for the Kulturforum, but the increasing inability even to formulate the conditions under which such a vision could emerge.

Revealing the stratified histories of the site may nevertheless open a path beyond this paralysis. It may allow us to move from a regime of consensus to one of productive disagreement, and perhaps toward a historically conscious form of urban debate that looks simultaneously backward and forward.

At the same time, the theoretical framework of Bau und Gegenbau, as articulated by Martin Warnke, reveals its own limitations. While it critically exposes National Socialist architecture as “stone-embodied ideology”²⁷, it risks reproducing the very canon it seeks to destabilise, remaining largely bound to monumental forms and thereby neglecting for example the “wooden” infrastructures of the regime: the dispersed barrack landscapes of forced labour that structured everyday wartime urbanism across Berlin. Seen from this perspective, the Kulturforum demonstrates that the opposition of building and counter-building, when used as an analytical lens, can collapse into stylistic critique unless it is expanded into a more complex understanding of building and destruction, of memory and oblivion as intertwined processes²⁸. Architectural history here is not a stable field of “ideological” forms, but a contested terrain of material absences and displaced narratives. Ultimately, the Kulturforum reflects not only competing planning models, but also society’s evolving – and often defensive – relationship to its own built past. The post-war attribution of a clear image of “Nazi architecture” enabled a simultaneous distancing: the past was declared overcome, and the “counter-buildings” of the Federal Republic offered a seemingly adequate form of historical resolution (“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”). The chapter appeared closed. Yet in the case of forced labour camps, this distancing extended further. The disappearance of material traces facilitated a broader relief from historical responsibility, allowing post-war society to externalise violence to distant memorial sites. Only from the 1980s onwards did a more sustained engagement with these absences begin to emerge – an engagement that remains incomplete.

Against this backdrop, the Kulturforum is less a static urban ensemble with mundane problems than a continuously shifting field of unresolved histories. Its challenge is not to be completed, but to remain open as a site in which the materiality of forgetting itself becomes legible – and thus critically available for future urban thought. In this sense, the site remains somehow, in Cavanna's words

a city with a loose texture, cut through by gigantic avenues, riddled with boundless squares swept by the bitter winds of the Baltic or scoured to the bone by icy storms coming in from the steppes²⁹.